Playing With the Enemy’ springs from deathbed revelation

Sunday

Columnist Gary Brown: Son tells story of his father’s life as a baseball prodigy whose dreams were dashed during an injury in World War II.

I was standing in the middle of a bookstore during an author signing,
talking to a writer who had gotten to know his father only the day before he
died.

“It was a story we didn’t know,” explained Gary W. Moore, author of “Playing
With the Enemy, A Baseball Prodigy, a World at War, and a Field of Broken
Dreams.”

“We didn’t know about his baseball background. It was something he didn’t
talk about.”

The athletic reputation of his father was well known enough outside the
family, at least while Gene Moore was growing up in a small Illinois town.

According to promotional material supplied by the book’s publisher, Savas
Beatie of New York, Gene Moore, at 15, already was playing baseball with
players in town who were twice his age.

“The older fellows didn’t mind having the Moore kid on their team because he
could hit the ball farther than anyone else; he was the best catcher anyone
had ever seen; he could throw men out from his knees; and not a ball ever
got past him.”

HOPING FOR STARDOM

Word of the elder Moore’s talent spread to professional scouts. By the
mid-1940s he was playing in the farm system of the Brooklyn Dodgers, hoping
for stardom.

This was before the younger Moore was born, of course -- decades before there
was a hint of a book about his father’s baseball career. And it was a
lifetime before the elder Moore had a heart attack in 1983.

Suddenly confronted with his father’s mortality, Moore recalled vague
comments by people in his dad’s past who had remembered the elder Moore as a
“good ballplayer.” And he remembered finding a 1949 letter to his father
from the Pittsburgh Pirates, asking him to report to training camp in
Greenville, Miss.

Questions about his father’s past welled up inside the son as he was
returning from taking his dad for a follow-up heart test at the hospital on
May 13, 1983, recalled Gary Moore.

“So that night I pressed him about details of his life.”

CAREER INTERRUPTED

The story unfolded almost in chapters.

First there was the time he spent as a prospect in the Dodgers farm system,
a career interrupted by Pearl Harbor and World War II. Those seasons were
followed by years spent playing baseball for a Navy traveling team to
entertain troops in the Azores and North Africa.

The traveling team was brought back to the United States toward the end of
the war. Team members were given a special top-secret mission guarding
German prisoners of war captured from a submarine. But baseball still was a
passion for players who were expecting to make it to the major leagues once
the war was over. So Moore convinced his commander to allow him to teach the
enemy prisoners how to play baseball, so he and his teammates would have an
opponent to compete against.

It was in one of those games that Moore suffered a career-ending injury, and
then was given a Purple Heart for his “war” wound.

Father and son spent hours talking about how the elder Moore had written the
government several times asking that they take back the medal, but
government officials refused. “He felt he wasn’t in the same category as
others who had been wounded in the war,” his son explained.

The son learned that his dad had suffered through depression over losing his
dream of playing professional baseball -- the 1949 Pirate tryout only proved
he no longer could play -- and how he had turned first to drinking and then
to silence in order to endure the disappointment.

“I don’t know if he enjoyed it (the talk). It brought back a lot of
embarrassment and pain,” recalled Moore. “But after it was all said and
done, I think he was relieved he told the story.

“For years, I thought if my dad didn’t want to tell the story, I didn’t have
the right to,” explained the author, who operates a water equipment company
in suburban Chicago. “Then one day my mother told me that ‘just because your
Dad didn’t enjoy talking about himself doesn’t mean he didn’t enjoy it when
others did.’ And she encouraged me to write the story.”

Moore interviewed dozens of people to verify the facts his father had told
him the night before his passing. What resulted from the author’s research
was “Playing With the Enemy” ($29.95, hardcover), a biography that was
published in 2006. Plans already are in place to make the book into a
movie. The author’s son, an actor, will take on the role of his grandfather,
Moore said.

“I wrote a book about my father, and my son is playing him in a major motion
picture,” said Moore. “It defies explanation. It really is a miracle and a
blessing.”